the abbasìd’s golden age 215in a sharp contrast to that which he adopted later in life. On his
father’s death, al-Œàrith would have inherited a sizeable fortune that
would have ensured riches and fame had he accepted to be the pros-
perous heir. But he rejected all of that wealth and opted for a course
of action that placed him among the poor and made him the
renowned flùfìwe know. The father’s Qadarite sect was not accept-
able to al-Muœàsibìthe son, al-Œàrith, and in that he came to the
conviction that he had no right to enjoy the life style, or later at
the father’s death, the inheritance of a father who he believed was
not on the right religious path (Al-Khisht, 1983). A strong conviction
of a fervent believer, and that was how al-Œàrith al-Muœàsibìwas.
To us, al-Œàrith’s desertion of his father’s wealth on the basis of
the differences in their religious convictions has a special meaning.
First, it demonstrates that he was a man who genuinely followed his
own conviction, even at the expense of a materialistic loss of a sub-
stantial magnitude. In that sense he substantially narrowed down
the gap between theory and practice, as he practiced what he
preached. Second, he was a scholar who followed his own thinking.
Not influenced by his father’s doctrine, albeit his father’s well known
stand among the sect followers, nor had he been affected by the
stream of religio-philosophical thought at his time, al-Έrith followed
his own thinking. He studied the teachings of the Khawàrij, Mu"tazi-
lah, and Murji"ah and the others, he followed his own thinking and
was later to criticise these religious sects fervently. His criticism, how-
ever, was objective; he would cite the points of disagreement between
himself and others, explain them well and then criticize them vehe-
mently. Between the advocates of the power of mind over the text,
such as the Mu"tazilah, and the proponents of the authority of the
text over the mind, such as the Khawàrij, he adopted a middle of
the road approach; no denial of the power of mind but no over-
ruling of the necessity of the text. To him, there was no contradic-
tion between the two, as the textual rules, cited in the Qur"àn and
the Œadìth, are in full agreement with the sound reasoning and infer-
ence of the sound mind. This approach has been demonstrably
applied to his teachings of flùfìsm and in the writing of Earnings
and Piousness, (or Asceticism) a book among thirty three books he
is reported to have written (Al-Khisht, 1983).
To add to his biography, he was born in al-Ba›ra, in Iraq, hence
his nickname al-Ba›rì. His exact year of birth does not seem to be
known for certain, though a recent biography by al-Khisht, 1983,